There are many steps to securing a server, but one of the most fundamental is to make sure that all of the core software running on it has all of the latest security patches implemented. Yet most linux installations, including the numerous virtual servers that can be deployed almost instantly, don’t have any automatic mechanism for updating the installed software packages enabled by default. That’s primarily because of the flexibility that linux offers – there is no assumption that one solution will suit every deployment.

However, there is a minimum that is recommended for most situations – and that is to run all of the security updates for the installed linux distribution on a daily basis. Although you wouldn’t likely stumble on the solution as to how to do this by accident, it is relatively painless to set up using the unattended-upgrades package.

First, you have to install the package itself, along with some mail software so that the system can email you the results of the process. Then it’s just a question of making a few configuration changes. After that, the update process should be picked up by the cron.daily script and run every day.

Step 1

Install the unattended-upgrades package and bsd-mailx (which will be used to send you email notifications of the success or otherwise of an update):

apt-get install unattended-upgrades bsd-mailx

As part of the bsd-mailx installation you will need to configure Postfix, if you haven’t already done so. Assuming your server has a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and is connected to the internet, it is likely that you will be able to use the default options.

Step 2

The main configuration file for the unattended-upgrades updates will be located here:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

To edit it, it’s probably easiest to use one of the built in command line editors like vi, although you’ll need to remember to type ‘i’ to insert text and then ‘:wq’ to save afterwards:

vi /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

There are a lot of lines in that file, most of which are already commented out. The default configuration should have the following section uncommented – which is all that you need to get the security updates to work:

The other lines in that section of the file which are commented out deal with running other, non-security updates automatically. You can ignore those for now. But you will need to uncomment the Unattended-Upgrade::Mail line further down in the file if you want the system to report progress to you:

// Send email to this address for problems or packages upgrades
Unattended-Upgrade::Mail “root@localhost”;

You can change the email address here to your own. However, I prefer to leave it to send email notifications to root and to set up an alias to forward all email sent to root to me. You can do this by adding a line to the /etc/aliases file: `root: your@email.com`. Remember to run `newaliases` afterwards to rebuild the aliases database.

That’s it! You should start receiving daily emails about any packages that have been upgraded on your server. You really should read these because there may be problems with the process, and there definitely will be occasions when a reboot is required to finish the upgrade.

This solution only deals with security updates. There will be lots of other updates to the software packages you use on your server – such as new features or other non-security related changes. If you want, you can enable those in the 50unattended-upgrades file as well, by uncommenting the other files in the main configuration section. However, I prefer to handle those changes manually in case an upgrade impacts other parts of the system.